In speaking with a safety professional recently we got to
talking about how he got into the safety profession. Like so many other professionals
in our field, he did not intend to become a safety professional. He was a floor
supervisor for a company that got bought out and rather than being laid off,
the new organization that purchased his company offered him a position in the
Environmental, Health, and Safety (EHS) department. He had no previous
experience in EHS at all, he sort of just fell into it.

Now, don’t get us wrong, this particular person has done a
pretty good job in the years since starting in the profession. However, it does
highlight an interesting and perhaps disturbing trend in the safety profession
– the fact that the overwhelming majority of safety professionals who got into
the profession did not intend to get into the profession. This fact alone is
not a problem. But like so many other things in our profession, we must
understand the unintended consequences that result from this.

To illustrate these consequences, compare the safety
profession to other professions, such as medicine or engineering. Typically
people get into these professions at an early age and because they want to. So
they go to college, take internships, and get locked into the fundamental
institutions of the profession (i.e. professional associations, academic
institutions). In the safety profession though, given that the majority of
safety professionals fall into the profession rather than intentionally join
the profession, we don’t see that. What we see is a situation you would expect
to see in an environment where a profession is made up of ad hoc professionals.
Here are some examples:

The average professional who joins the profession will be
less qualified in terms of knowledge, education, and training.

This will lead to an overall lower average level of
knowledge, education, and training for the profession as a whole.

The average safety professional who joins the profession
unintentionally will be less likely to be aware of institutions that exist to
shore up the profession, such as professional associations and academic
research.

This leads to a highly divergent and fractured knowledge
base due to a lack of continuing education.

Further this leads to a lack of profession-wide forward
thinking and innovation, as we’re always trying to play “catch-up.”

One can also draw correlations between this lack of entry
standards for our profession and the compliance culture that permeates most
safety professional thinking. After all, if you haven’t been given a
theoretical and practical foundation for thinking about safety and you have
been thrust into a safety position, needing to get up to speed quickly, the
most efficient thing to do is to mentally outsource your safety thinking to
compliance with regulations. This is why if you ask the majority of safety
professionals what the safe way to do something is they will respond by
parroting some form of regulatory requirement.

We do not blame these professionals and we do not mean to
disparage the well-intentioned and passionate individuals who joined the
profession by accident (in fact, Paul, who’s giving the presentation mentioned
above, is a safety professional by accident too). Rather, as Paul will discuss
in Orlando, problems do not get solved until problem solvers identify the
breadth and depth of the problem. We have many highly-intelligent individuals
within our profession and at SCM we believe that if you get enough
highly-intelligent people in a room and give them the proper parameters for
problem solving some really amazing things can happen.

But Paul will have more to say on this topic next week, so
we won’t steal his thunder.